Research Director

Command Staff
Research Director
Research Director	Difficulty: Medium to Hard Requirements: None Access Level: Research Sector, Artifact Lab, Toxins Research, Toxins Storage, Chemistry, Telescience, Teleporter Room, Bridge, EVA, AI Upload, Maintenance, Superuser level for TermOS Additional Roleplay Access Level: None Supervisors: Captain Subordinates: Scientist, Research Assistant Responsibilities: Supervise and lead the research department, coordinate with other departments if need be, maintain the TermOS network, make sure the science team doesn't blow everything to kingdom come. Guides: AI Laws, Artifact Research, Calling the Escape Shuttle, Chemistry, Chemicals, Plasma Research, Telescience, TermOS

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Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your office.

Your starting location. But where's your calling?

Your office.

Congratulations, Research Director! You're the Head of Staff of the Research Wing and rarely competent Scientists who staff it. Your job is mainly just to prevent Research from blowing up, burning, and getting covered in radiation for as long as possible. Chances are, you won't be successful at that, but that's okay. As an RD, you have arguably the most relaxed and easy Head job on the station, yet you're also the most potentially dangerous. If you're interested in trying out a Head job but you're afraid of being awful, RD is the job for you. As long as you don't blow up the Research Wing, send your unstoppable Guardbuddies on a rampage, or let a Traitor do these things, it's almost impossible to be a bad Research Director.

Your Tools

You come equipped with a few of tools used by a regular scientist and then some, including:

• A headset with access to the research radio channel and command radio channels, which can be communicated on by prefacing your message with :r and :h, respectively.
• Spectroscopic scanner goggles over your eyes
• A custom research director's labcoat of science, with an extra 5% more chemical resistance than the standard labcoat. Right-click its sprite to button and unbutton it for the right mix of science and fashion. If you prefer the regular labcoat, there's one in your "Research Director's locker", inside a box labeled "Research Director's clothing".
• A PDA with a built-in reagent scanner, health analyser, signaller, and a special application that functions like a more limited version of the Port-A-Sci remote that only your PDA and the AI PDA have. The program can send the Port-A-Sci to a home turf, but not summon it to your location.

Sysadmin: TermOS and You

Main article: TermOS

As RD, you also have access to the Computer Core and a backup of the network in your equipment locker. This is quite handy since some Telescience and Artifact Research issues require taking a look at the mainframe in the Computer Core.

Thanks to your superuser (SU) access, you also have control over the science department's entire computer network. Notably, you can use the DWAINE terminal in your office to assign your Guardbuddies to various jobs!

So what's my actual job?

It's in the name. You're a "Research" Director, so you can conduct experiments in the various labs of the Research Sector. You could explore off-station areas in the Telescience lab for example or make healing mixes in Chemistry. Like Scientist, you can pick and choose whatever you'd like and work at your own pace without worrying about research quotas, grants, conferences, or any number of boring things RDs in real life have to deal with. It's possible to even forgo your work entirely and just have a bender in the Bar.

You're also a Research "Director", a supervisor for the Scientists. Part of that is reining them in when they do something dangerous without taking the proper precautions, acting as a sane scientist to their mad scientist. For example, try to make sure people test their bombs in either the Test Chamber or off-station if it's REALLY dangerous (e.g. a canbomb), and tell them to give at least some sort of warning to the crew before the test occurs. Just try your best and act in good faith; you won't get banned if you try and fail to prevent someone from testing their bomb in Bar. It's not all about being a buzzkill though. As RD, you can coordinate your underlings for gimmicks too! It's "safety first, then fun", not "safety first, no fun".

In addition, you're also a Head of Staff. You can call and recall the escape shuttle, and your voice has a lot of weight when it comes to discussions as to whether or not it's time to send the shuttle. You also have Bridge and AI Upload & AI Chamber access. As a Head, people also sometimes look to you for guidance, because they typically expect you to have a fairly good grasp of the game's science systems. You also have access to a specialized ID computer within your office which allows you to grant access to your department in the form of job changes or granting specific accesses within your department's Access Levels list, or demote members of your department to a Staff Assistant, as well as granting EVA access in the event of emergencies.

Things You Can Do

Everything is better with friends, and one of the great things about being RD is facilitating gimmicks and collaborations. For example, if you have a couple of Scientists who are a bit of bored and looking for something to do, and there's another Scientist (or really anybody) trying to make as much meth as possible, you could very well direct your idle scientists to your enterprising Walter White and help out their meth-manufacturing empire. You could also do your own gimmicks!

Telescience Gimmicks

Telescience is often ignored during games because it requires cooperation from other people to do anything really fun. However, as RD, your entire point is to foster cooperation and efficiency among departments, so figuring out how the teleporters work this round is very helpful. If you've figured out how the teleporter works, all sorts of fun can come of enabling other peoples' gimmicks.

• Space explorers can be beamed back to resupply and offload their finds, or even better their finds can be beamed back for them. All they need to do is to feed you the appropriate coordinates and you can take care of the rest.
• Beam them out to dangerous derelicts and crack them open like a peanut.
• Are those lazy-ass miners not doing anything with their space suits? Lock in on their locations via the space GPS, teleport them to Research, and distribute them to your staff!
• Are the Engineers illegally building a bunch of guns? Teleport them into Research and give them to your chemists!
• Steal all the monkeys! Make a zoo!

Convinced? You should be! Check the Telescience article for more details.

Chemistry Gimmicks

Failing all that, being the RD is pretty much carte blanche to waste your entire round trying to figure out new and interesting ways to use chemistry. Here are some examples:

• Fill some fire extinguishers with space cleaner and market them as cleaning supplies. Give one to the Janitor(s) and ask them to see the difference.
• Have everyone make dozens of chicken soup pills and set up a futuristic restaurant!
• Create tons of colorful reagent and use it to decorate the station/ship. The recipe is fairly complicated, but if you get multiple people to work on different sets of ingredients, you can make the workload much easier.
• Try to acquire as many different drugs as possible into one pill, then ingest it. The more people chipping in their ingredients, the better it'll be!
• Collaborate with the Bartender to create some truly out-of-this-world cocktails.

Other Gimmicks

Below are some gimmick ideas that aren't necessarily attached to just one particular department.

• Run a public science expo/museum and work together to create exhibitions that demonstrate the wonders of SCIENCE!
• Set up a science show in the Bar or Chapel or some such, where you have speakers demonstrate all sorts of cool and possibly dangerous phenomenona (with proper precautions, of course). This doesn't have to be restricted to just Scientists; people like the Chef, Bartender, Botanists, Engineers, etc. can participate too!
• Lead an expedition into one of the Adventure Zone areas or even one of the Trench, Z5, or Debris Field areas. Get other crew involved so you can show them the horrors wonders beyond.

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. In addition to the usual Scientist objectives, you can also expect to see the following:

Ensure that Heisenbee escapes on the shuttle
That cute and adorable space bee that starts in your office must end the round on the Escape Shuttle--alive. Most of the time, you can usually just leave them in your office and wrangle (click on them with Grab intent) them to the Escape Arm when the shuttle's about to arrive.

If you want to be extra-safe, keep him in a locker, so that he's protected from any explosions that reach your office, and make some strange reagent, so you can resurrect Heisenbee if he does die. When the shuttle's about to dock, drag him to the shuttle, and keep him in the locker, in case someone bombs on the shuttle in transit.

Doctorate in Evil: Antagonist RD

Truly, the only difficult part of being an antag RD is choosing just one plan of action out of your dazzling array of horrific and devastating options. In addition to the already wide array of things antag Scientists can do, you have control over the departments which dictate who lives and who dies, an army of loyal robot servants, and Head access. A competent RD who knows how to put all of these things together can put on one hell of a show.

Dr. No: Traitor RD

Do you like mad scientist gadgets? As a Traitor RD, you get plenty of them. You have an impressive 10 (count them, 10—you have a doctorate, so counting should be child's play) job-specific syndicate items available for purchase: the AI Laser Upgrade Module, the chemical grenade pouch kit, the Disguised AI Law Module, the Guardbuddy ammo replicator, the handheld ChemiCompiler, the poison bottle, the poison bottle bundle, stimulants, the syringe gun, and the teleport gun. And remember, this is all in addition to the standard itemlist.

According to the laws of physics, the deadliness of an AI is directly proportional to the amount of frickin' laser beams they have access to. It follows then that the AI Laser Upgrade Module will indeed make the AI more deadly, since it gives them the ability fire 30 BURN lasers out of any security camera, on a 10 second timer. Simply put the module into the law rack like any other law module, and see the results. It helps if you also weld and/or screw it in place to make it harder to reverse. It'll also help to modify the laws so that the AI has greater allowance to kill people, since the module itself does not subvert the AI or change their laws.

If rogue robots are more your style of supervillainy, then the Disguised AI Law Module is for you. It's tinted green, but instead of containing a law from the standard, Robocop, or Nanotrasen lawsets, it lets you put whatever nefarious law you want on there (within the bounds of the Rules). You can order multiple modules, too. In theory, you could swap out the AI and Cyborgs' laws with a custom lawset (perhaps one inspired by murderbot HK-47 of Knights of the Old Republic, for example), and anyone casually inspecting the AI Upload might not suspect anything, since the default law modules and disguised law module share the same color.

The teleport gun is particularly evil. Once linked to a beacon from the Teleporter Room (notably not the Science Teleporter, but the one that works with your hand tele), each shot from said gun will warp the unlucky target to that beacon. Bring the beacon to any place you'd like to see your victim whisked away to and let loose - and the beacon can be anywhere, including the combustion chamber, deep space and even the Adventure Zone! Unleash your creativity to come up with interesting and unique traps!

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